Do any of today's titles have the staying power of Chess... or even Monopoly?

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In today's inter-holiday news doldrums, the Ars IRC channel has descended into a deep debate over the kind of question that seems perfectly suited for a late-night dorm room bull session. It's a question that seems simple on the surface, but it requires investigating issues of game design mutability, the evolution of taste, commerce, and even digital code preservation to unpack fully.

The question is this: What video games that exist today, if any, will still be widely played for fun by people living 100 years from now?

The germ of the question came from Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, of all people, who used a trip to South Korea's Youth Mind Sports Fair to tweet about the longevity of chess, as compared to today's hot "e-sports." While Kasparov was respectful of video games and their unique artistic qualities, he was skeptical that any digital game could have the centuries-long impact of a board game like chess.

"Tough for chess to overtake League of Legends, the most popular game here, but I don't think they'll play that in 100 years. Chess, yes!" Kasparov tweeted. "People get bored with a computer game as soon as a new one comes out with slightly better graphics. Chess has captivated us for centuries."

Chess is not alone here. The best board and card games show a surprising resilience to being passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, more so even than literature. Classics like Go, Pachisi, Shogi, Backgammon, Checkers, Bridge, Poker, Dominoes and more can trace their histories back for centuries. More recently, corporate-controlled games like Monopoly and Scrabble have stood the test of time across multiple generations and seem likely to endure well into the future as well.

Which brings us back to Kasparov's assertion. Will your great-grandkids still be playing League of Legends, or any current game, to fill up their idle time? Extending it even further, could any digital game last the 1500 years or so that Chess has existed?

Ground Rules

Enlarge/Call of Duty may be popular in 2114, but Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, specifically, probably won't be.

To answer that question, we need to lay down some ground rules to clarify exactly what we're trying to answer. First of all, let's assume that these games will be playable in some form on whatever hardware is available a century from now. This is far from a settled question, for sure, and making sure today's games are still in a usable form well into the future will require a lot of dedicated work in digital preservation and emulation. For the sake of simplifying the argument, though, let's assume that such emulation will be possible, or that someone will be able to remake today's games from the ground up for that far-future hardware, in a form that preserves the basic gameplay.

This raises another potential wrinkle in the question: How much can a game change over the next 100 years before you start to consider it a different game than what we're playing today? People who play Chess, after all, aren't playing the same game that people played when the game was introduced in seventh-century Persia. Everything from the initial board setup to the way the pieces moved was in constant flux in those early years of the game and remained so for centuries. The rules to chess weren't widely formalized internationally until the 18th century, and variations on esoteric elements like castling and stalemates were up in the air until the 19th century. Yet the game was still considered "chess" for that whole time.

You could argue that video game franchises work the same way. If a series like Call of Duty lasts 100 more years (which is far from a given: 100 years is a very long time), the 2114 version will probably differ wildly from what we consider Call of Duty today. Yet there will be a lot of similarities, too: the basic idea of running around and shooting people in the face as a team will likely endure, as will the most basic types of weapons and game modes.

Still, I'd be hard-pressed to consider those century-separated editions of Call of Duty to be a single "game" that has existed for 100 years. Despite all the complaints about yearly sequels being essentially the same game dressed up in newer graphics, each iteration of a long-lived game franchise brings important changes to the core game that amount to more than just rule tweaks and refinements. It seems unlikely that we will ever reach a standardization point where the Call of Duty franchise is no longer evolving and changing significantly from year to year. Even if it does, it's clear we are not at that point yet.

These evolving franchises definitely share widely held elements of a genre, and game genres, from first-person shooters to MOBAs, will likely continue to exist in some form in 100 years. But we're more interested in which specific games will still be played in an essentially unchanged form after all that time, rather than what games will inspire genres that will continue to exist.

The line can be fuzzy here, what with remakes and spiritual successors and graphical upgrades that make surface changes without altering the basic gameplay much if at all. Still, just because a franchise lasts through 100 years of sequels doesn't mean the original game, as it existed initially, can maintain its popularity for that entire time.

True timelessness

The hardware and presentation might change, but Tetris as a game will likely outlive us all.

And that brings up the final issue: what do we mean by "widely played." Many of today's games will (hopefully) be of historical interest to some future researchers and hobbyists, but we're more interested in what video games will actually be popular entertainment for a mass audience of lay people in 100 years. These games don't have to be the most popular pastimes that far in the future—as Kasparov noted, chess is currently a lot less popular than Starcraft in Korea. But the game should at least be familiar to and occasionally enjoyed by millions of people out of the billions on the planet to qualify for our question.

This is a difficult bar to get over, and it eliminates all but the most timeless of entertainments. For reference, think about what kinds of movies, books, songs, and even games were wildly popular in the early 1900s. Then consider how few of those are even given passing familiarity today. Now try to look 100 years in the future and predict which games will still endure.

The first game that jumped to my mind, after considering all of these caveats, was Tetris, a game that feels fully contained and likely to have the same addictive appeal to far-future generations as it does today. Classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also arguably timeless enough to endure for a century. More linear, story-based games will have a harder time standing the test of time, but there's an outside chance that early titles in the Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda series will be remembered similarly to great, early 20th-century children's literature in 100 years' time.

That's just off the top of our heads, though. We're sure the Ars readership will have plenty of other nominees to argue over. It's not an easy question to answer, but it's definitely a fun one to consider. Put your pick in the comments and help us come up with a picture of gaming in the far future.

Promoted Comments

I think to compare the longevity of games you need to allow video games slightly broader classifications. Like instead of asking how long Call of Duty will be around, you ask how long first person shooters will be around. And the answer is a long time. It's already been a long time--40 years, if you go back to Maze War. Chess and League of Legends are not analogue; Chess with Friends, say, or Chessmaster 9000, and League of Legends are. If you compare games along the lines of gameplay mechanics, I think it becomes safe to say that lots of game archetypes that mostly originated, or were popularized, by video games will be around a good while.

genres will remain. RTS, shoot em ups/combat, MMOs, etc. Beyond that, its a question of the latest skin and graphics. i see plenty of chess sets, but the tried and true black/white is more popular than the donkey kong version.

"For reference, think about what kinds of movies, books, songs, and even games were wildly popular in the early 1900s."

Well, I think a LOT of games and books from that era are now "popular" if not "wildly" popular. Like you mentioned, many boardgames have endure not just from the early-90's but from long before then. Books, also, have withstood the test of time. From Shakespeare to Little Women and hundreds of others there an entire genre of book "classics" that are likely to be read for hundreds of years into the future.

The other two media you mention, movies and (recorded) songs, were in the infant stages of development. It's no wonder movies and songs from that era aren't popular now; they're simply not in the same realm as modern movies / songs....or even movies songs from 50 years ago. On the flipside, classic movies made in the 40's, 50's and 60's are still popular today. As is music created in the 60's, 70's, etc. Both movies and music have shown they can produce classics that stand up 50+ years. My guess is Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Led Zeppelin and U2 will be enjoyed by many well into the 21st century.

And that may be the real question here. Is the current video game medium more like early 20th-century movies...or more like 1950's-era movies? My guess would be more like early 20th century movies. I'm guessing that 100 years from now we won't be sitting on a couch with a controller in our hand...but with something plugged directly into our brain, with an effect akin to the Star Trek's holodeck.

The difference between that experience and today's gaming experience is akin to the difference between a silent, black and white movie and today's 3D blockbusters. Therefore, I doubt today's iterations of any games will be popular in 2114. As someone else said, a holodeck 1st-person space marine shooter is about as inevitable as a 2015 edition of Call of Duty.

I think a better benchmark for how to compare if a game now is the same in the future would be to say, given a person that had a certain skill level with the "old" version of the game, and a short but reasonable amount of time (a day or two) to get used to the "new" version of the game, would their skills reasonably translate?

Also, a good benchmark for if a game is still widely played may be if there are any organized, paid events to support it?

This works for chess. If you changed a couple of rules like knights jumping, or castling, or how a piece or two moved, a reasonably good player with a bit of practice could probably still be a reasonably good player. This works for pool as well... a great eight ball player can transition to 9-ball and due to their raw game mechanics skills should still be a pretty good 9-ball player, once they work out a few little strategy changes.

I'd say that applies well to single screen games like Tetris and PacMan, but this is one of the things that makes large complex video games less comparable. Take super mario brothers... does a person that was great at SMB have transferrable skills to all other 2d platformers? I would say yes, but to a much lesser extent. I was decent at SMB, but bad at Sonic, for example. There are two components to this... first drifting gameplay mechanics (sonic's speed ultimately got me), and second the specific changes to the game layout... I was good at mario because I could play for 15 minutes blindfolded (well... you know), and I never put in the time with other 2d games.

The second part is really hard to translate. What makes players good across all shooters is reaction time and familiarity with the controls. What makes them great at any particular game is familiarity with the maps. In a board game or game like pool, or sports like football and soccer, the map changes are minimal and immediately discernable, while the mechanics (chess pieces, stick and ball, running with a ball, kicking a ball) are self-similar.

For those reasons I would say that, no, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Call of Duty 2114 would not be the same, nor would a precise 3d VR gun-in-hand holodeck style port of Ghosts be the same game, although a much more realistic port that is basically a massive-HD upgrade with the same game mechanics and controls and same level layout could be the "same".

Coming back to the paid organized game part, Chess still reigns supreme, and I say no video game will come close to matching Chess for this in the future. Even Tetris, Space Invaders, and Pac Man in all their varieties aren't played by that many people today, compared to their golden years, and while there still seem to be donkey kong and pac man competitions, the real paid pros have left those pretty far behind already. I predict a lot of throwbacks, and thousands of ports that would qualify as the "same" game, but ultimately only scattered actual use, and nothing widespread.

But I could be wrong... if I'm around to find out (I will be over 130 years old), I promise to try and hold a pac man tournament to prove myself wrong.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

167 Reader Comments

I would say Mario 64 has a real fighting chance of being played in its original glory in a hundred years from now... not widely, but I guess as much as an present day Virtual Console game is... like how we still play Joust and Asteroids

I can't think of any first person shooter that would be.

It's a tough comparison... yes people play Chess... and people play Monopoly.. sometimes, but do that many people really break out Monopoly more than twice a year?

If you wrapped up every different chess set with different pieces and called it a different game, would that count against chess? Is simpsons chess different from game of thrones chess? So considering FPSs are all pretty much the same game with different wrapping, I'd say that *game* will be an enduring game.

Edit: I mean every video game in a given genre is pretty much just that. Same game, new wrapping. And we like the new wrapping. It gives us a new experience. The medium just isn't the same as "classic" games like chess or parcheesi. It requires new wrappers on a regular basis to keep people playing. (really, to keep people buying). So I'd say that games within established VG genres are "classic" in so far as they're genre classics. We're all still playing Doom and Quake and Goldeneye... just with better graphics and more precise controls. We're all still playing Final Fantasy, just with new worlds and more powers and different focii, but still an RPG. Look at the plethora of "match three or more items and have them leave the screen" games or other puzzle types. Maybe they all descend from tetris. And the only reason Tetris stands out as an independent game is because they failed to secure copyright.

If you wrapped up every different chess set with different pieces and called it a different game, would that count against chess? Is simpsons chess different from game of thrones chess? So considering FPSs are all pretty much the same game with different wrapping, I'd say that *game* will be an enduring game.

DOOM and Call of Duty are seperated by less than half a century and are wildly different games, despite both being first-person shooters. It's not just a case of different textures. Madden today is completely different from Madden on the Genesis, even though football itself hasn't changed much. Simpsons chess and game of thrones chess use the same rules, same mechanics, same assets and really don't compare to subtly evolving games in the way you think they do.

EDIT: Alright, I think I see what you mean, even if I still disagree with you. Just because something was first in the genre doesn't mean everything else in that genere should be dismissed for being derivative. Game-changing evolutions can still occur that would leave the old version by the wayside (think baseball and rounders, the game it was derived from).

If you wrapped up every different chess set with different pieces and called it a different game, would that count against chess? Is simpsons chess different from game of thrones chess? So considering FPSs are all pretty much the same game with different wrapping, I'd say that *game* will be an enduring game.

All those chess sets play the exact same chess game, though. First person shooters are widely similar, but they differ in much more than just the wrapping. Speed, weapon selection, game modes, maps, loadout items, etc. etc. etc., all of which affect the actual game, not just the look.

Chess sets, on the other hand, literally affect only the way the pieces look. It's not a fair comparison.

I think to compare the longevity of games you need to allow video games slightly broader classifications. Like instead of asking how long Call of Duty will be around, you ask how long first person shooters will be around. And the answer is a long time. It's already been a long time--40 years, if you go back to Maze War. Chess and League of Legends are not analogue; Chess with Friends, say, or Chessmaster 9000, and League of Legends are. If you compare games along the lines of gameplay mechanics, I think it becomes safe to say that lots of game archetypes that mostly originated, or were popularized, by video games will be around a good while.

If you wrapped up every different chess set with different pieces and called it a different game, would that count against chess? Is simpsons chess different from game of thrones chess? So considering FPSs are all pretty much the same game with different wrapping, I'd say that *game* will be an enduring game.

DOOM and Call of Duty are seperated by less than half a century and are wildly different games, despite both being first-person shooters. It's not just a case of different textures. Madden today is completely different from Madden on the Genesis, even though football itself hasn't changed much. Simpsons chess and game of thrones chess use the same rules, same mechanics, same assets and really don't compare to subtly evolving games in the way you think they do.

Eh, that's like the rules of chess settling down, though isn't it? I mean by the author's own admission, the rules for chess changed over time until the gameplay smoothed out. It's happened more rapdily in the FPS world, and other genres, but overall, I'd say that CoD is still the same thing as Doom in the most fundamental way. Kill the other guy, don't get killed.

I honestly don't think you can classify video games in the same way as you can classic board and card games. The way you play actual chess will remain the same for a hundred years... the way you interact with video games does/has not.

The Idea of the MOBA is only like 10 years old. League of Legends and Dota2 are blazing the trail in defining what it means to be an e-sport. There is no way the genre stabilizes in 10 years but it is still MOBA even after it's evolution.

How many years did it take a sport like football to standardize it's rules? According to wikipedia american football had the first set of formalized rules in 1880 and the forward pass was added in 1906. Is it still football? General consensus is that football still started in 1880.

MOBAs will be sports in 100 years played regularly. They will be very different games, but still MOBAs.

I think old 80s video games will come back in style when a billionaire creator of an MMO dies and leaves an egg hunt to choose who inherits his fortune. But other than that event no one will play old games because they will be remade better.

Now that that is out of the way, more serious ideas. I think series like Halo, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Metal Gear will probably last a decade or more in various iterations only to be replaced later with other long terms series like perhaps Titanfall or Destiny, but its unlikely those will last longer than 20 years or so. More universal game themes are likely to endure. Your board games, Monopoly, Backgammon, 3-person chess, checkers, and your card games, Poker, Blackjack are likely to endure. More enduring games like Go or Mahjong that have been played since the pharaohs are guaranteed to be there at the rapture. My feeling is that the genres will still be there in 100 years but the titles and series we play now are likely to peter out only to be replaced with the new. Sure things like CoD have been around for a long time but after a while it will stop being the go to game only to be replaced with something else, but the first person shooter will endure.

That is assuming, of course, that anyone even touches computers after we discover The Man (tm pending) is watching everything, including our allegedly secure encryption techniques (looking at Tor, RSA, secure email that isn't, etc).

I'll be a pessimist and say we are almost certainly in a digital dark of the future. It is very likely that proprietary hardware and decryption keys necessary to enjoy current video games will not be present in the future. How many movies of the 80s are released only on VHS? How many of them will be viewable even 50 years from now?

I would say Mario 64 has a real fighting chance of being played in its original glory in a hundred years from now... not widely, but I guess as much as an present day Virtual Console game is... like how we still play Joust and Asteroids

I can't think of any first person shooter that would be.

It's a tough comparison... yes people play Chess... and people play Monopoly.. sometimes, but do that many people really break out Monopoly more than twice a year?

How many times has Nintendo re-re-re-re-released one of the three original Super Mario Brothers games now with only a few 'upgrades or tweaks'? I could easily see it lasting into a hundred years.

More to the point - if you considered the overarcing concept that Chess isn't so much a game as it is a 'gametype' - with the rulesets being individual games - how many video game archtypes will still exist in 100 years.

Will we still be playing platformers or stealth games? Will we still be killing zombies and Nazis and their slightly painted over alternate clones with abandon? Will racing games still have a point?

After your first rule/assumption, the question is pointless. It is exactly because of hardware obsolesce that "e-sports" won't have lasting appeal. After all, why play an old game on an 2-d screen when all the kids are having fun with latest holodeck mano-e-mano shoot-em up.

I would argue that all in all gaming is still in its infancy as an art form. Yes I think you have fair odds of a couple oldies sneaking through. Tetris as you pointed out is pretty timeless and could be reskinned to suit the look a new bit of hardware could give it without in any way changing the fundamental underlying game. But if you look at the history of movies, you have the earliest moving pictures in the late 1880's and if you look at IMDBs top 250 films, you don't see any classics appearing until the 1920s. Its not until the 1940's, 50 years after the earliest films that you get more than a handful of pictures from the decade. (And before anyone pounces I know that IMDBs top 250 is hardly a definitive best movie list, but I wanted a quick source for numbers). I do think we will see games developed that will stand the test of time but i think most of those lie in front of us, not yet in our review mirror.

<<Edit>>Additionally as I expect Ars to be around in decades to come I would love to see them archive the comments to this and revisit the topic every 5 years or so, letting us laugh at our wild mistakes and perhaps be impressed at guesses that are still around a decade or two from now.

If you wrapped up every different chess set with different pieces and called it a different game, would that count against chess? Is simpsons chess different from game of thrones chess? So considering FPSs are all pretty much the same game with different wrapping, I'd say that *game* will be an enduring game.

All those chess sets play the exact same chess game, though. First person shooters are widely similar, but they differ in much more than just the wrapping. Speed, weapon selection, game modes, maps, loadout items, etc. etc. etc., all of which affect the actual game, not just the look.

Chess sets, on the other hand, literally affect only the way the pieces look. It's not a fair comparison.

But you simply *can't* make the argument that video games are going to flatten out like chess did. Even when we play Call of Duty 502932 on the Holodeck, it will still be a First Person Shooter. Its roots will still be doom with no mouselook and arrow key movement. The only fair way to draw a comparison is in sweeping generalizations. Game styles, game architecture.

After your first rule/assumption, the question is pointless. It is exactly because of hardware obsolesce that "e-sports" won't have lasting appeal. After all, why play an old game on an 2-d screen when all the kids are having fun with latest holodeck mano-e-mano shoot-em up.

I think old 80s video games will come back in style when a billionaire creator of an MMO dies and leaves an egg hunt to choose who inherits his fortune. But other than that event no one will play old games because they will be remade better.

Not if TI sticks to its current upgrade schedule for standard graphing calculators. Pong, Tetris, Super Mario, falldown. All in gorgeous monochrome for centuries to come!

Not a specific game but a type of casual game. Match 3 games. These have a timeless quality to them. From what I've seen, they have a pretty good blend of strategy and luck that keep people hooked. In 100 years or so, we'll be seeing fully realized holographic playing fields with sensory perception (think touch or smell) variants on these type of games. And people will still be playing them like crazy.

I think only the most basic of timewasters will be widely played virtually unchanged for the next 100 years. Games like tetris and minesweeper.

But even then, the rise of smartphones has probably taken a huge chunk out of the playerbase of those games. Why play minesweeper when you can just pull out your phone for a rousing game of plants vs zombies?

I also don't count computerized implementations of physical games, like solitaire, chess, and the like. Follow the patent rule: If it's "... but on a computer!" it doesn't count!

edit: note that games like madden are not 1:1 scale reproductions of football, and thus do count. For solitaire, the only difference between playing on the computer and playing on the desk is it's probably shuffled better and stacked neater on the computer.

As a personal wish, but I am fairly certain it will never happen as game tastes will change too much - the Splinter Cell series. Ubisoft has been a horrible caretaker of the franchise. They changed the original gameplay mechanic too much - as in removing the suspense of a well timed / executed tactic or level. They could of grown the spy genre with a nearly limitless palette of ideas but chose to go for the cheap dollars.

Anyway if I could wish for something to happen, it would be the Splinter Cell series carried on in the manner from which it was founded.

I don't think boards games to computer games are a fair comparison. As touched on above, FPSes are still in their infancy, really: the reason people flock from game to game is because the differences in play from year to year are enourmous. We're also contending with things like ballistics versus hitscans, a relatively slow transaction speed (comparing a near-real-time FPS to turn-based strategy like chess), dramatic changes in display technologies, etc.

In 100 years, no computer games from today will be in common play. 100 years after that, though, I wouldn't be surprised to see games in play for that long with essentially insignificant changes. I anticipate high-fidelity VT being readily available, and much of the world having high-speed, high-bandwidth connections. Computers are still improving pretty rapidly, but the effective benefits to a gamer will plateau at some point. Persistent worlds will, I think, be more common with player-driven story.

So, instead of the current "change the world every few months" model of most MMOs, we'll see more persistance, and more PC-world-driving. Kind of the EvE model, at least in general. (I haven't played EvE, so take that with some salt; I'm going by what I've heard of it.) Games will be created with a model of the world, and basically left running. I wouldn't be surprised to see a mixing of genres; RTS and FPS, for instance. Some players run the game as an RTS and act as commanders; other players run as an FPS and take missions given by organizationally higher-level players.

It has a perfect balance between interaction, story, and visual artistry. the story is simplistic enough for everyone to enjoy, the visuals are closer to cartoon than sprites, and the gameplay is more rhythm and timing than anything else.

Secret of Mana is also a strong competitor, as is Sonic 2 .... probably not going to see anything contending with the 16bit era in terms of longevity for quite a while simply due to it being one of those rare moments when the maturity and skill within an industry out paced the technology supporting it.